CCSS Meeting #79: Tipping in ecosystems

This lecture will be held in physical format at the CCSS Living Room (Min. 4.16) with lunch and refreshments provided. The overarching topic of the CCSS Lunch Meetings of the academic year 2025/2026 is Tipping behavior in Natural and Societal Systems.

Speaker Overview
Prof. dr. ir. Max Rietkerk is a full professor of Spatial Ecology and Global Change and Head Environmental Sciences at Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. His research concentrates on Spatial Ecology and Global Change. Max discovered the principle of scale-dependent feedback, underlying emergent spatial self-organization in many ecosystems, and he is also part of the team revealing generic early warning signals for critical transitions in complex systems.

Lecture Overview
The concept of tipping points and transitions between alternative stable states and their early-warning indicators is now widely applied to large-scale climate system components. However, it was first developed in ecology, where it has been applied to explain dynamic phenomena in ecosystems. I will briefly outline the history of tipping in ecology and its applications to various ecosystems such as fisheries, grazing systems, shallow lakes and savannas. I will also discuss some general early-warning signals including their limitations. Finally I will illustrate the dependence of tipping on spatial scale applied to data of tropical forest-savanna transitions, which demonstrates the need for rethinking the concept of tipping in general.

There will be 45-min lecture from the speaker, followed by a 15-min discussion session.

To attend the lecture, please signup below before 15:00 on Wednesday February 11.